I really can’t tell you how long ago I first read Carver’s story. But I bet it’d been fifteen years since I’d last sat down with it, when I started drafting this one. And I didn’t let myself revisit Carver’s masterpiece until I was well into the writing. I say that because you ask about templates, and I guess the model I wanted to use was the one based not on the manuscript version of Carver’s story, but on what the story had turned into with time. I first wanted to work with the picture that had formed over the years and turned into memory, this sort of faceless visual of two couples at a table with a bottle between them, talking as a day slipped by. Only later did I go back and open Carver’s collection and decide that I wanted to give my story that same entrance, to really bind those worlds, with the narrator saying, “and people from there think it gives them the right.”

Once you decided to take on the Carver story, there are a limited number of elements that come into play. You’ve got four characters, a round table, and a bottle of spirits—gin for Carver, vodka for you. Was it challenging to figure out how to use those elements or liberating to start a story with such clearly defined parameters?

I promise you that there is no end to the pulling-out-handfuls-of-hair, woe-is-me, there-is-no-hope structural challenges that I can find myself wrestling with when writing a story. But you’re asking if it was liberating to work with very limited elements, and the answer is: Wildly so. Everything is so much clearer once a world is framed. Maybe it sounds crazy, but with writing it’s infinity that is limiting, and the limited that allows for the truly infinite. Once all those elements are in place in a story, the brain is truly freed up to imagine without end.

“What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” was the title story of Carver’s 1981 collection, which, like much of his work, was edited by Gordon Lish. The extent of Lish’s editorial intervention has, of course, been the subject of much debate (some in this magazine) over the past few years, and in 2008 a number of Carver’s stories were issued in their original form, among them “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” under the title “Beginners.” Was this a debate that you followed? Did you ever look at the longer draft of the story and if so did it have any impact on your reading of the 1981 version?

I did follow the debate, but from afar, taking it in with a sidelong I’m-already-decided kind of glance. I’m a compulsive re-drafter, and I’m pretty religious about the idea that in the end a story will find its final true form, and when it has found that form, that’s what the story was meant (in some fated way) to be. I did not read “Beginners,” but I do remember—and this is probably when I was studying in Iowa—reading “The Bath” after reading “A Small Good Thing,” Carver’s original exploration of the story. I just see them as two different works. They’re not in conflict to me. “A Small Good Thing” with its “Small Good Thing” ending cut, is a totally different experience. It’s not a different version of the same story, it’s a different story. I’d say the same feeling would apply to the other stories of Carver’s which have also been published in what Tess Gallagher calls, in The New Yorker article you reference, their “true, original” form. Simply, anything that puts more Carver stories into the universe, makes for a better (if more depressing) universe.

I should stop there, but I do want to say that when one has been working on something for a long time, with great emotion and in extreme isolation, at first look the brain cannot even process what is happening when a line is cut, because the brain has built this world to exacting specifications with that line present. And I’d also like to say that you are a very kindly person, as is my editor Jordan Pavlin, at Knopf, because very few people want to get on the phone and talk you off a ledge while you argue a comma for twenty minutes as if the future of humankind hinges upon it. So I’m not making light of the fight over the “right” versions of the Carver stories. I’m clarifying my belief that—if I can muster the idea of infinity again—for every single story, there are infinite versions that can be made. It’s the quantum-mechanical many-worlds interpretation put into practice. And with each editor, a different world will form, and one has to trust (that is how I maintain my equilibrium) that that is how it was meant to be. The version of “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank” that appears in the magazine is slightly different from the version as it will appear in my collection next year. I do not consider the two versions to be in conflict. And, though the changes are small, a short paragraph cut here, a pronoun changed there, neither do I see them to be the same thing. It is a Schrödinger’s cat kind of feeling for me. They are both the same story, and different stories, and they both hold those positions simultaneously in my head.

Carver’s characters argue about love. Your story is about love, too, but your characters are debating notions of Jewish identity. The narrator and his wife have a secular life in Florida, whereas his wife’s old friend from yeshiva, who lives in Israel, has shifted from an Orthodox to an ultra-Orthodox existence with her husband Mark—or Yerucham, as he is now known. Mark argues that Judaism is a religion, not a culture, attacking what he sees as an American obsession with the Holocaust and claiming that Judaism cannot be built “only on the foundation of one terrible crime.” Do you want readers to take the side of your secular narrator, or would you rather their allegiances keep shifting over the course of the story?

I fear this answer is going to sound all delicate and rarefied and persnickety, but it’s the truth: I never take sides in a story. And I don’t mean that if the story is called “The Baby-Seal Clubber Steals A Christmas Present” that I’m going to tell you I’m wholly neutral and can’t tell the difference between the kid weeping as she stares at the empty Christmas tree, and the clubber of baby seals who also steals from children. But, in a case like this, what interests me when I’m writing is being able to crawl into a character’s head and speak from his or her mouth. It’s not pulling the strings on a marionette, it’s not playing ventriloquist, and it’s not mimicry. It’s about inhabiting a character, and, at the same time, being totally unaware of what you’ve become. The best way I can explain it is by mustering that early childhood betrayal that is learning to ride a bike. Maybe they teach it differently now, but when I was learning, we were all put on a bike, we then looked behind at a parent holding that bike steady, and we peddled with the safety of knowing that our parent was right behind us, supporting that bike, and running along. And then, at some point, we looked back to find the parent wasn’t right there, but up the street, growing smaller, cheering us on, because we were somehow peddling on our own. And it is in that moment where, in my case, I’d crash into a pole, or a tree, as I was overcome with the awareness of what I’d been unaware I was doing. So, what I’m trying to say about taking sides is that, at its sweetest, when one is writing, one is picturing the setting, and thinking about plot, and aware of language and rhythm, and monitoring word usage and repetition, and seeing where everyone is in the room, and moving them around, and hearing what they’re saying, while living inside a husband’s head, feeling his feelings, thinking his thoughts, looking out through his eyes, and also maintaining that same position inside the wife’s head, and the visiting friend’s, and the friend’s husband’s head, too. That is when the writing gets done. And, often, the moment one recognizes that the writing is getting done in that way, there is very little time before you flip ass over teakettle and end up with gravel in your knee.

Your characters, drunk and high, end up playing the Anne Frank game—deciding who might hide them and who might betray them were there to be another Holocaust. Is this something you invented for the story? Did you always know the story was going to close with this game?

I think I did always know that the story would close with this game, yes. As for the invention of the game, it would be very easy to couch the answer in a way that was honest but less revealing. The truth is that the idea for the game comes from the fact that my sister and I have played the game forever and ever. She is older. And she invented it. And what turned it into the material for a story was when—and this traces back twenty years—it became clear to me that it wasn’t a game at all. The highest compliment we give to certain friends is to say something like, “Yes, Nicole would hide me. She really would.” Everything started to bubble up when my sister said, about a couple we were both friendly with, “He would hide us, and she—she would turn us in.” And I knew in my heart that my sister was right. And I got to thinking about what it is to know that—or believe that—about certain people. It’s a judgment being passed on someone’s soul. And, in the story, I take the idea to its extreme.

This is the title story of your new collection, which will be published in February. You’ve also been working on a new translation of the Haggadah—the story of the Exodus—as well as translations of the Israeli writer Etgar Keret’s stories, and you’re currently adapting your story “The Twenty-Seventh Man” into a play. Has the work of translation or playwriting changed the way you approach your fiction? Does a short story seem harder or easier in comparison?

The translations and the play have absolutely changed the way I approach my fiction. And the “approach” is the perfect element to ask about. The composition part, the discipline part, everything involving craft—that all forms more concretely over the years than does a writer’s sense of self. I have the good fortune of knowing a lot of writing folk, and except for a couple of people who have succumbed to the belief in their own worth—which is exceedingly rare, and in most cases, as in a children’s fable, risks shriveling up all that makes a person’s work good—most of the people whose writing I believe will be read in a hundred years are plagued with extreme self-doubt, constant suffering and self-loathing, and are, at their most relaxed, generally fraught and worried. And the place that anxiety most affects a person is, very literally, during the approach, when a person is approaching his or her desk, or about to enter into the work, or move forward, or take a great stride. What I’m trying to say is that a lot that lies behind being able to live the writing life is psychological, and wrapped up in ideas of self-definition. So after you’ve trained yourself to do the work, that is, once you’ve got the sitzfleisch, and the focus, and the skills, and a sharpened pencil, and you’ve pushed a cabinet up against the fridge, and thrown your cell phone out the window, and yanked your router from the wall, there is the issue—and, I promise you, more than any other writing issue, this is the one—of engaging with the work and all that floods into your head that is related to that work, but not truly of the work. All these thoughts are very finely intertwined, and untangling them can sometimes seem like trying to pull apart a roll of fiberglass insulation and separate it out into individual glass threads. Spending these last years absorbed in tasks by which I do not identify myself, and for which I have very few reference points, has allowed me to hear, when approaching my fiction, right at the instant when all the frequencies are tapped into at once, what is static, and what is tuned. So writing stories is not easier in comparison to the playwriting or translation, the stories are easier in league with them.

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